NEW WAVE...OLD WAYS:
USUALLY she'd call home from the station for a lift. That night, she decided to walk the short distance. It was a fatal decision.

USUALLY she'd call home from the station for a lift. That night, she decided to walk the short distance. It was a fatal decision.

They found Elizabeth Walton the next day, December 3, 1982, in the grounds of West Coats Primary School, Cambuslang - the school her daughter attended.

Attractive and vivacious in life, in death she wasn't a pretty sight.

She had been strangled and savagely beaten. After death, her clothes were stripped off and her body, wrists and legs mutilated with a knife.

By her side, lay her clothes carefully tied in neat knots, laid out in a line. This wasn't just a brutal murder - it was a ritualistic killing. An extremely dangerous man was on the loose.

For ritualistic, read serial killer. All the patterns were there. This was a murderer who wasn't going to stop.

Local cops pulled out all the stops. Early on, they called in the Serious Crime Squad to help.

The biggest team of cops Lanarkshire had seen in years started knocking on doors and a caravan HQ was set up near the scene of crime. It took only three days for their first breakthrough.

A man, Iain Scoular. arrived at the caravan saying he had information that may help. He'd been near the scene around 11 pm on December 2, the time of the killing, and noticed a suspicious-looking man hanging around some bushes. Scoular gave the cops as much of a description as he could remember.

Scoular was 24 years old, politely spoken, from a good family and lived in a very nice house near the scene with his well-to-do parents. The cops would follow up the lead.

Yet the more detectives inquired into Scoular's sighting of the mystery man, the more intrigued they became about Scoular himself. To put it politely, he was a bit of an oddball.

From a successful family, Scoular had been a failure at school. He was an outsider, a loner, prone to making up stories and, at times, depressed. His despairing parents had sought help and he'd been treated by a psychiatrist.

That was it. Nothing extreme to worry about. Just an oddball, but being an oddball didn't make him a murderer, did it? Then cracks began to appear in Scoular's story.

He had said to cops that he'd been home by 11 pm on the night Elizabeth Walton was killed. But he hadn't reckoned on the cops speaking to his overprotective mother. Or her talking to them.

Jean Scoular kept a tight leash on Iain, in spite of him being 24. When he went out, she sat up waiting for him. If he wasn't back at a decent hour, she would go out in her car scouring the streets until she found him.

Jean and her husband were concerned by how often the cops were interviewing their son. Probably they knew him as a not very bright, naive guy and worried he might be implicated in a very serious matter they believed he had nothing to do with.

His father wrote to the chief constable to complain. It had no effect. After all, there was a potential serial killer on the streets.

His mother went to the cops' caravan to take issue with the murder squad. That's when she revealed Iain hadn't come home until 1am on the night Elizabeth Walton was killed - two hours later than he'd told the cops.

Mother had inadvertently put son, if not in the frame, then at least under suspicion. Iain Scoular was interviewed again and changed his story twice, lying both times.

Then witnesses identified him as having been seen running fast past the shopping centre in Cambuslang shortly after Elizabeth Walton's murder. Now he was in the frame.

Jean Scoular visited the cops again, arguing for her son's innocence. While there, she said: "Next you know you'll be charging him for that taxi driver."

The cops hadn't thought of that, but now they would.

A couple of months before, on October 1, 1982, the body of taxi driver Catherine McChord was found crammed into the boot of her cab in Braeside Place, Cambuslang.

She had died violently, with deep stab wounds to her chest and the back of her head.

The cops had carried out a huge exercise, interviewing taxi customers and drivers, especially female drivers. All to no avail.

Then they found out Catherine had spent three years in jail for a £143,500 scam of a spot-the-ball competition. Had she still been active? Connected to gangsters? Was this a hit?

Catherine wasn't active or connected and it wasn't a hit. She was just an innocent woman going about her job when a crazy man decided to kill her.

The cops had got nowhere near catching Catherine's killer, but Jean Scoular gave them an idea - comparing Catherine and Elizabeth's murders. There were similarities.

Both had died violently. In both cases, a knife was used by a left-handed person, just like Scoular.

Neither had been sexually assaulted. Both died a short distance from each other, close to Scoular's home.

But there was something even more uncanny. Inside Catherine's taxi a cigarette lighter, an inhaler and her car keys had been carefully positioned in a straight line on the driver's seat.

Was that the start of the type of ritual many serial killers develop? A ritual that would grow with each killing? Like Elizabeth Walton's clothes being carefully knotted and left neatly beside her body?

Nice theory, but they needed more. They got help again from Jean Scoular.

When she had gone to them to complain, she had said something else about the night Catherine McChord was killed. That Iain had been at home with her and her husband that night.

Checking their notebooks, they soon realised that someone was lying. Iain Scoular had given a different account of his whereabouts.

There was more. The police activity had stirred people's memories.

Two separate witnesses identified Scoular as running away from a taxi the night Catherine was killed.

Then the forensic team made a breakthrough. Two hairs from the jacket Catherine McChord had been wearing were found on Scoular's trousers.

They had enough. Iain Scoular was charged with double murder.

The trial at the High Court in Glasgow, in May 1983 was a harrowing experience for the jury as details of the murders were revealed and graphic pictures shown.

Scoular sat in the dock unmoved by the proceedings. Even when psychiatrists described him as a psychopath, he didn't show a flicker of interest.

But when the same doctors said he was sexually impotent, he looked up, anger and protest in his eyes.

It was the closest Scoular came to a reaction during his 14-day trial.

The jury found him guilty and, sentencing him to 20 years in prison, Lord Allanbridge said: "I consider you an extremely dangerous young man."

Few people in Scotland disagreed. The question remains, if Scoular hadn't gone into the police caravan of his own free will, would he have become known as one of Scotland's most notorious serial killers?